Margaret and I closed on the new house yesterday. And, of course, this has required a range of formal encounters with a host of different bureaucracies. Utility companies. Insurance companies. Title companies. And then some. In the process, we’ve been amazed and amused at the number of different ways our identities — especially Margaret’s — have been magically transformed by the default assumptions of different institutions. To wit:

  • Our insurance company knows that we’re not married. At least not to each other. In spite of the fact that the friendly agent we dealt with asked about our marital status so that he could process the policy accurately, the final paperwork showed up . . . and Margaret was listed as “Mrs.” More curious, though, is that her last name remained the same, so she’s evidently now married — by an astonishing coincidence — to some other member of the Werry clan.
  • Margaret handled most of the calls for fresh utility accounts on the new place, since all but one of the utility accounts on the old place are in her name — and her name only. When she called the gas company and gave them the new address, though, she found that she’d already been “disappeared”: when the previous owners of the new house made arrangements to close their account, the gas company automatically put the new owner’s name into their system. And, though both Margaret and I would have shown up on any formal records of the then-still-pending transaction, the gas account for the new house was already set up solely in my name. Perhaps the gas company figured I was so enraged by Margaret marrying someone else that they assumed I’d already kicked her out.
  • As we were signing up for thirty years of debt yesterday (and so I am no longer unencumbered), we hit the part of the paperwork where the government asks for racial/ethnic identifiers so that it can (ostensibly) make sure that fair housing laws aren’t being violated. And though no one at any point prior to this had asked either of us to self-identify along these lines, we were both listed as “White.” And only “White.” As I added the other relevant X’s to this form, I said something about how this new (to them) information had better not do anything to mess up the deal.* To her credit, the closing agent sounded genuinely horrified and disturbed at the very thought that such a thing could happen to anyone.

Meanwhile, the house remains lovely. But evidently, I’m now a single white male. And Margaret has been lucky enough to find a new husband who already had her last name. I do hope she’s happy. Maybe the gas company can tell me where she and Mr. Werry are now living.

*In Seeing a Color-Blind Future, Patricia J. Williams writes about a real estate transaction coming to a screaming halt the moment she corrected the same mistake on her paperwork.